A good article in the New York Times about Nikola Tesla's only surviving lab and the company that wants to sell it for $1.6M and deliver it to a buyer: be delivered fully cleared and level. The lab on the site was designed by noted Architect Stanford White and is a gorgeous building. Efforts are being made to turn it into an historical site with a museum of Tesla's work.
A Battle to Preserve a Visionary's Bold Failure
In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all.
It was the inventor's biggest project, and his most audacious.
The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. The blinding flashes, The New York Sun reported, "seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand."
But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory.
Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe - what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.
A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company's real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can "be delivered fully cleared and level," a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.
It would be a tragic loss if this place was leveled. Tesla's inventions include the fluorescent light, the system of power generation and distribution used worldwide to this day (even his choice of 60Hz and 110/220 remains the standard in North America). He displayed a working radio controlled boat three years before Marconi sent his three dots across the Atlantic. He also invented the alternating current synchronous motor and the three phase motor. The guy was a genius but he was also very flamboyant and quite neurotic so history has not treated him very kindly. The fact that he has been adopted as the poster child for every crackpot conspiracy theorist and UFO-logist out there doesn't help either.
